Tinysaurs

Monday, June 26, 2017

From time to time, I build kits from other makers and share my feedback. It's a great experience, and every maker's kits are elevated by the experience of trading information about how they assemble.

We all approach instructions differently, and solve some of the making problems with differing talents. Instructions are often difficult to make and difficult to follow, so any advancement in this realm is a benefit to everyone. For instance, I include tiny instructions with Tinysaurs, naturally, so I put 3D instructions online in an effort to clarify some questions I was receiving about assembly.

Ronald Nelson of Induku Design makes amazing wood items. I got his Strandbeest and his Schrödinger's cat in a box. (My wife has asked me to put a spot of glue on the cat so that we can preserve the uncertainty.) His version of the Strandbeest is amazing and elegant. He has a great write-up of his development process and the original giant creation by Theo Jansen here.

The arrangement of gears creates a massive amount of torque from wind or finger power to overcome the imperfections of my assembly. I've attempted to make many all-wood mechanical laser cut things over the years, but have been unsuccessful without smooth machined parts. Ronald's Strandbeest kit has inspired me to keep trying.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Thanks for helping us make double our Kickstarter goal!

We've finished the Medusa prototype and have added the first stretch goal of $5,000. Your help has been wonderful. We still have 26 days to go in the campaign and several stretch goal ideas, so please keep sharing the project!

Four-legged snake fossil stuns scientists—and ignites controversy

Scientists have described what they say is the first known fossil of a
four-legged snake. The limbs of the 120-or-so-million-year-old,
20-centimeter-long creature are remarkably well preserved and end with
five slender digits that appear to have been functional. Thought to have
come from Brazil, the fossil would be one of the earliest snakes found,
suggesting that the group evolved from terrestrial precursors in
Gondwana, the southern remnant of the supercontinent Pangaea. But
although the creature’s overall body plan—and indeed, many of its
individual anatomical features—is snakelike, some researchers aren’t so
sure that it is a part of the snake family tree.

The team’s scientific interpretation may be the least controversial aspect of the discovery, which they report online today in Science.
The specimen’s provenance seems to be murkier than the silty waters
that once buried its carcass. Whereas the team’s analyses strongly
suggest the fossil came from northeastern Brazil, details of when
it was unearthed and how it eventually ended up in the German museum
where it now resides remain a mystery. Those details matter to many
researchers and especially to some from Brazil, because it’s been
illegal to export fossils from that nation since 1942.

Aptly, the new species has been dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus.
The genus name, in Greek, means “four-footed serpent.” (Previously,
fossils of creatures considered to be protosnakes have only sported one
set of limbs, usually hindlimbs.) The species name amplectus,
which comes from Latin, means “embracing” and refers to the creature’s
flexibility and presumed ability to wrap tightly around its prey. The
front part of the fossil—which appears to be complete and has all bones
in their original, lifelike arrangement—lies in a tight coil, a
demonstration of the animal’s extreme limberness, says Nicholas
Longrich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bath in the
United Kingdom and co-author of the new study. Besides the tiny limbs,
the specimen sports a skull the size of a human fingernail, 160 spinal
vertebrae, and 112 vertebrae in the tail.

The fossil had resided in a private collection for several decades
before it gained the attention of team member David Martill of the
University of Portsmouth. He stumbled across the specimen during a field
trip with students to Museum Solnhofen in Germany. No notes about when
or where it was collected are available, the researchers say. But
certain characteristics of the limestone that entombed the fossil, as
well as the distinct orange-brown color of the bones themselves,
strongly suggest it came from a particular area of northeastern Brazil,
Longrich says. The sediment that became those rocks accumulated in calm
waters on the floor of a lake or a lagoon sometime between 113 million
and 126 million years ago, he notes.

Regarding the legality of the fossil’s collection or export from its
presumed home country, Martill says “Who knows how the fossil came from
Brazil”? Furthermore, he notes, to assert that the fossil was collected
illegally a person would need to ascertain when it was unearthed. But
such questions are irrelevant to the fossil’s scientific significance,
Martill maintains. “Personally I don’t care a damn how the fossil came
from Brazil or when,” he says.

Many features of Tetrapodophis point to its snakiness.
Among squamates, the group of reptiles that also includes lizards, only
snakes have more than 150 spinal vertebrae, the researchers note. The
creature’s teeth are pointy and slightly curved. Also, the fossil
includes some scales that stretch across the full width of the belly, a
trait known only in snakes. The dramatically reduced size of the
creature’s limbs, as well as a cylindrical rather than a flattened tail,
suggest that snakes evolved from terrestrial animals that burrowed, not
from marine creatures as some researchers have proposed, Longrich says.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

More dinosaur bones yield traces of blood, soft tissue

Scientists studying dinosaur evolution are finding many more bones to pick.
Researchers
from London have found hints of blood and fibrous tissue in a
hodgepodge of 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones. These fossils had been
poorly preserved. That now suggests residues of soft tissues may be
more common in dino bones than scientists had thought. Details appeared
June 9 in Nature Communications.

Scientists are excited
at the idea that soft tissues might still exist in most dinosaur bones.
It would give them the ability to study these long-extinct animals at
the cellular level. And such studies could reveal when dinosaurs
switched from being cold-blooded to warm-blooded creatures.

Matthew Collins is an expert in the study of ancient proteins at the
University of York in England. (Proteins form the basis of living cells,
muscle and tissues. They also do the work inside of cells.) Until now,
scientists had thought that traces of soft tissue from dinosaurs
remained only in really well-preserved fossils. “It’s exciting to think
that we may have more soft tissue in dinosaur bones kicking around,”
says Collins, who was not involved in the new study.

Susannah
Maidment is a paleontologist at Imperial College London in England. She
was part of a team that has just found residues of soft tissue in
slivers of eight dinosaur bones. These included a toe claw from a theropod.
There also was a rib from a duckbilled dinosaur. All had been found
about a century ago, mostly in Alberta, Canada. Since then, the bones
had been stashed in drawers at the Natural History Museum in London.

The team used a scanning electron microscope
to study the bones. This special microscope can highlight features that
are just a few billionths of a meter across. The dinosaur bone images
revealed what appeared to be red blood cells. A second type of powerful
microscope probed the structure of some bone features. These images
showed bands similar to patterns formed by collagen in animal bones
today. Collagen is a fibrous protein. It is found not only in bones, but
also in cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Dinosaur Eggs Ready To Hatch Secrets 200 Million Years Later

In the late winter of 1976, the world famous fossil collector James Kitching was doing a survey near South Africa’s border with Lesotho.

To his surprise he found a tiny clutch of six fossilized eggs along the side of the road at a place known as Rooidraai.

It
took five years for skilled palentologists to remove enough rock matrix
from the eggs so that they could be preliminarily identified as the
first dinosaur embryos from South Africa and the oldest dinosaur embryos in the world.

Research
on dinosaurs has truly blossomed in the 40 years since Kitching’s
extraordinary find and a great deal more is now known about the baby
dinosaurs in the eggs. But the exceptional secrets they hold are only
now being fully uncovered because of developments in technology. This
month the eggs were flown to Grenoble, a city at the foot of the French
Alps, where they are being examined under a powerful CT scan at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.
The
secrets of the embryonic dinosaurs whose parents roamed South Africa
200 million years ago are in the process of being hatched.

These
high-resolution, 3D x-ray imaging methods are burgeoning in
palaeontology. With advances in modern imaging methods we are now able
to digitally remove rock matrix while making 3D models of the bones
inside.

CT scans come to the rescue

The solution to all of these
problems lies in CT scanning the specimen. The x-ray resolution needed
to study the embryos is so high (six microns, or .006 mm) that only a
few facilities in the world are capable of performing the study.

In late 2014, a team of us put together a winning proposal to scan the eggs at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
in Grenoble. At the facility, a huge ring of electrons (almost a
kilometre in circumference) traveling at .99% of the speed of light
continuously generates beams of high-energy X-rays. These beams can be
harnessed with great precision to peer through rocks and image the
fossils inside.